2.)

"So, do you do the whole 'munch' thing a lot? I kinda freaked out when I saw you, I gotta admit..." That munch was my first. I was hoping to run into someone who knew about my stories, but not like this. God, not like this.

"I've been to a few! But mostly it winds up with older men wanting my phone number, or couples wanting me to go home with them - it's honestly like being in high school again."

High school was, for Blossom, a very different experience to Mia.

"But the people are mostly nice and I usually don't end up paying for my own food. It's kinda neat to see people out in the world. Like a sanity-check, a reminder that behind that aol.com email-address-based username is a real person. How about you, Mia? I haven't seen you at one of them before."

"Uh... no, this is kind of new territory for me." I looked down at my hands and picked at my fingernails. The night ended a lot sooner than I expected. I probably wouldn't go to another one. "I mostly stick to online stuff. Forums, Twitter. I wanna join a friend's Discord server but I feel like it will really get in the way of my schoolwork."

"You won't know until you try!" Blossom said. "That's what my Dad said whenever I was unsure about something, and for a long time I never took his advice. But then, when I finally listened, my life got a whole lot better."

Coincidentally, that was about the same time Blossom... well, bloomed. Getting stacked was definitely helpful in her finding her confidence, though no amount of body development would undo how tall she was.

"I'm proud of you for going. To the munch, I mean. If you hadn't, I wouldn't be here legit talking to my favorite author in the whole world!"

"Internet author," I corrected, but Blossom looked at me with uncharacteristic certainty. Confidence was one thing you could always find somewhere on Blossom's face. She would say something wrong and say something right with about the same conviction, and she usually wouldn't change her mind one way or the other. But this was different; this time she was sure. I was a little taken aback. "Seriously?"

"Seriously! So liiiiike when you started posting K, I totes blew off a date with this real hottie just so I could stay home and read. And then I reread the other Academy stories to see if there was stuff I'd missed, even though you'd only posted like two chapters of K! If I had room on my wall I'd totally have a conspiracy board with red twine and stuff, and a picture of Ai in the center!"

There was this light to Blossom when she gushed, a fire in her voice, a genuine... passion.

"Ai hasn't even been in the series for two stories," I smiled dumbly. I never got to talk about my writing! "Why would she be in the center?"

"Because! Her name is like a pun, it's like Ai, but it's also I, like 'me' like 'ego'. She's like the reader self-insert, representing our curiosity and stuff!"

This was clearly a theory she'd been percolating on for a while.

"Huh." That actually made a lot of sense. Was that my intention? Not really. But it was naive to assume Ai wouldn't come back sooner or later.

"So what other theories do you have?" I asked. I honestly wasn't milking her for ideas; I just wanted her to talk about it. Anything about it. The characters, the plot, the smutty ageplay stuff. I wanted her to tell me every single thing she felt and thought about Academy Works. I wanted to know I made something lovable.

"This train would need to run all night for me to have the time to talk about all my theories." Blossom beamed happily and clasped her hands together in front of her chest, a pose that really showed Blossom's years as a cheerleader.

"Okay so I'm pretty sure that Talita and her big brother were like a huge mess up, and that's the first time we've seen the Academy make such a big mistake. And then the stuff with Mrs. Hopper… I think something happened and the Academy is in decline. Maybe the leaders died, or a revolution happened, or a change in management, I don't know, but something happened! I am so sure of it!"

"What makes you think that?" I had no doubt in my mind that Blossom already put together that Mrs. Hopper from Academy T and Angela from Academy K were the same person; I wasn't very subtle about it. Blossom's "Academy is in decline" theory wasn't so unrealistic when you thought about the way they handled Angela.

They, like it wasn't me writing it.

"They're just so in control with Ai and Bala, and even when Ai escapes it almost feels expected." It was almost surreal to hear someone so conventionally popular be so invested like this, but then again that was its own harmful little stereotype, wasn't it?

"And it feels like after what they did to Mrs. Hopper in T," Blossom went on, "that they didn't know what to do with her. She's not a Candy so they just kinda stashed her in the Kindergarten, which seems like a nightmare. She can watch everyone else live pretty fun lives full of color, and she gets none of it. I'd rather have a fate like Bala than a fate like Mrs. Hopper. Give me the Cold Room; I'll be a good girl. But don't make it so people can't see me, holy crap."

I was beaming. I had heard theories about the Academy Works stories ever since I started posting them online, but forum posts weren't quite the same as hearing someone babble about it in person. Then a thought occurred to me.

"Wait, do you have an account on DD?" I wanted to know if she had left me any comments, but she looked sheepish at the question.

"Welllll, I tried to make an account on there once and then the whole site crashed and everything broke and it was a huuuge mess. So I just read quietly and enjoy it! You had this one commenter that I just wanted to reach out and slap though; he was such an entitled jerk."

I admit, I was a little crestfallen. I looked down at my fingers and kept picking at my nails. Maybe this was a prank after all? If she had a post from last year, at least then I could be sure.

"You should make an account," I tried, though the prior excitement was definitely lacking. "You have a lot of good thoughts."

"I wouldn't know what to say," Blossom admitted.

"Anything," I shrugged. "Your favorite part? Favorite line? Just... thoughts on the story? One person just posts an emoji, so the bar isn't super high." Even an emoji felt nice sometimes. So much of what I got out of writing was hearing people talk about it. Academy I had so much attention, it inspired me to start Academy B right away. But T didn't get a whole lot. K was a joke. I sunk deeper into my seat.

"Or we could hang out together and I can gush and babble about it to you in person. That's gotta be worth at least two emojis on a forum!"

"I guess." Honestly, I was so wrapped up in Academy Works talk that I had kind of forgotten who Blossom was. Of course she didn't post online. Why would she? She was probably just reading along to get off.

That started a whole other train of thought. Did she get off to my stories? Did Blossom Brixley find diapers erotic? She had to, right? Why else would she be on that forum? But I couldn't put those two thoughts together, like trying to shove a square into a circular hole.

"You're totes not what I expected, by the way," Blossom said. "I mean I guess I didn't know what to expect out of the author of Academy Works; it's like finding out what Lemony Snicket looks like. 'Cause like in your head, he's always gonna be Patrick Warburton."

There was a little of that casual popular girl callousness in how she worded that, but it didn't seem malicious. Just careless.

"I would never have guessed by looking at you that you'd be sooo... perverted?"

I would have taken more offense if she wasn't so right about it. I wasn't that sexual. Or sexy. I was five-foot-five, a half a foot shorter than Blossom. I was also kind of fat. Or chubby? My mom would call me "healthy", but the two were synonymous to her. I had glasses, wavy brown hair, and appeared generally unassuming. It was like looking at Anne Hathaway at the beginning of The Princess Diaries, if Anne Hathoway were fat and her hair weren't so frizzy. Unfortunately, taking off my glasses and straightening my hair didn't really make me look any better. Maybe I could pull off an early America Ferrera, if she were really, really white.

"Yeah, well... I can't really say the same about you," I said sourly, picking roughly at my fingernails. "Though I guess stuff like this wasn't really what I had in mind..."

"Just goes to show that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, Mia Moore!"

Here was the truth about Blossom: before she started high school, she was a mousey little teenager who didn't get a lot of attention. When that changed, she found that the kind of attention she got was often the amorous type. She was hot, and… well, she wasn't a member of the Purity Club, that much was for sure. There had been a period of time when people said she was named Blossom because she spread her legs like a flower spreading its petals. So she didn't take offense to Mia implying she was a bit of a pervert, because... well, she was.

"I've only read about it," Blossom said, about as vaguely as possible, "but it's so hot."

There were a lot of implications in that one sentence. Blossom didn't actually do any of this baby stuff. She was interested enough to go to a munch, but not hit up a Walgreens? But she found it hot. Not just hot. So hot. What was so sexy about acting like a baby? But I couldn't answer that question either, and we were in the same boat. So what was this to her? A fad? Was she more the caregiver type? A baby? None of them fit. Then again, she did tell me not to judge a book by its cover.

"You said Academy B was the sexiest?" I asked, tilting my head. "Why is that?" This time, I wasn't looking for Academy Works lore; I wanted Blossom Brixley lore.

"It's a perfect balance. The punishment of the cold room, the brainwashing with her dreams, and the almost-voluntary surrender before she even gets to leave that solitude. By the time she crawls through that tunnel, she's literally been reborn. She doesn't wanna be anyone else but who they made her. It's not identity death; it's a complete transformation, with the same parts of Bala that made her up before still being there, just... reprogrammed, and reassigned."

That was the academic answer, pardon the pun, so Blossom also added:

"And the idea of voluntarily losing control of like..."

She looked around the train car and leaned in close to whisper a little.

"To lose control and be completely dependent on diapers? Wow."

Blossom fanned herself again as she leaned back.

My cheeks were red just listening to her talk about it, and not just because I was flattered. Though I was flattered. So she really liked all that stuff?

"Yeah, I... I guess that makes sense." In a lot of other diaper smut stories, it was about breaking someone down so they weren't really themselves anymore. Or it was someone willingly wanting it. In Bala's case, it was kind of both: she was broken down enough that she wanted it.

"What about you?" Blossom asked out of the blue. "Who is your favorite?"

"I, uh..." Was she fishing for something? Was she recording me? Did she actually want to know? I would just keep my answer vague enough to avoid a sound bite.

"If you're trying to get spoilers out of me, I'm not giving them," I said plainly. "But... I guess my favorite character is Ai. Because she's... I dunno. Broken. Even if she wanted to give up, she can't. She can't let herself be happy." After a pause, after too much silence, I felt anxiety creep up my spine. I had said too much.

"Aya is a close second right now," I added. She was the newest protagonist, the main character in Academy A. The stories were released in the following order: I, B, T, K, and A. The first four were finished, but I was still writing A.

"Aya is interesting! Academy A has this sort of... Matilda meets Pippi Longstocking, with a big Enid Blyton vibe! Like Peter Pan if Peter Pan was set in a Victorian boarding school instead of on an island full of racist stereotypes and pixies."

Blossom thought about something for a moment, before adding:

"Do you think you're like Ai? Maybe you can't let yourself be happy? I don't wanna pry but like... you saw someone you knew at a munch for people of the same interest, and you ran away."

"I... uh..." No one had ever asked me something like that before. She kind of sounded like what I imagined a therapist would sound like. And this was Blossom Brixley of all people!

"I dunno. I guess my fight-or-flight response is always set to flight? And this stuff, this part of me... no one knows about it. So I saw you and..." I got scared. I didn't want to say it, but that was the truth. Even now, I was scared that this whole thing was a joke.

"Well, I know about it now, Mia. But you know it about me too. If this were a story on that forum, you'd use that to blackmail me, and all sorts of hijinks would happen."

Blossom made spirit fingers with her hands for emphasis and smiled contently before she crossed her arms about her ample chest.

"True," I laughed. Mutual assured destruction, like the Cold War. Not as sexy as the Cold Room, but just as effective. Though nothing I had on her was damning enough with which to blackmail her. Likewise, everything she had on me was just hearsay. But the sad truth of the world is that hearsay is more powerful for the popular than it is for the invisible.

"So," Blossom urged, raising an eyebrow, "what'll it be? Blackmail story? Or unlikely friends?"

"Well, I do like breaking tropes," I smiled. "So I guess your secret is safe with me."